The Bogus Buddha

James Melville

The Bogus Buddha is one of a series of novels about Tetsuo Otani,
police superintendent of Hyogo prefecture, Japan. Light-hearted and
urbane, they fall into the "polite" mystery tradition rather than the
"hard-boiled" one. Though his writing fits comfortably within genre
conventions, Melville uses the Japanese setting (and elements derived
from the Chinese Judge Dee stories) to create something new. He is now
among my favourite crime novelists.

Melville's plots are skillfully paced and thematically engaging,
involving the unusual and out of the ordinary without becoming fantastic
or implausible. (In The Bogus Buddha two separate strands end in
murder: tensions between academics at a summer school on Japanese culture
and an underworld struggle between gangsters.) But the real attraction
lies in the characters and their relationships. One-off characters
sometimes have leading parts, but it is Otani's family and assistants who
take on a life all of their own, often threatening to steal the story.
"Ninja" Noguchi, a slightly seedy figure with contacts throughout the
underworld, and ladies' man Kimura, responsible for anything to do
with foreigners, are particularly memorable, as is Otani's wife Hanae.
But we keep returning to Otani himself, who centres everything.